Mick Hartley

No need to head out onto the streets: now the internet brings the sounds of the city into your home. The London Sound Survey (via) features sound clips from around London – Columbia Road flower market, a Wembley cheapjack, Brick Lane curry touts, Walthamstow market, or, if you don't fancy yer cockney patter, maybe the bells of St Vedast in the City, or the muezzin at the Whitechapel mosque, or a street preacher at Speaker's Corner. Loads more, from station announcers to a sing-song down at the Duke of Kendal. 

It's only been going since last year, so it'll get better. Of course what we really want is to hear the street cries from yesteryear. There is a historical section, but necessarily with descriptions rather than yer actual sounds. If only we could hear along with Henry Mayhew in the 1850s:

A bootmaker, to 'ensure custom', has illuminated his shop-front with a line of gas, and in its full glare stands a blind beggar, his eyes turned up so as to show only 'the whites', and mumbling some begging rhymes, that are drowned in the shrill notes of the bamboo-flute-player next to to him. The boy's sharp cry, the woman's cracked voice, the gruff, hoarse shout of the man, are all mingled together. Sometimes an Irishman is heard with his 'fine ating apples', or else the jingling music of an unseen organ breaks out, as the trio of street singers rest between the verses. 

or Dickens' Oliver Twist a decade or so earlier:

Turning down Sun Street and Crown Street, and crossing Finsbury square, Mr. Sikes struck, by way of Chiswell Street, into Barbican: thence into Long Lane, and so into Smithfield; from which latter place arose a tumult of discordant sounds that filled Oliver Twist with amazement.

It was market-morning. [. . .] Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market…